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A man wheeled his battered bike up to the shed Sunday evening and, turning to the nearest bystander, asked: "Who's in charge here?"

Lyle Mitchell glanced around, shrugged and responded: "Um, everybody?"

That's the feel of the Bike Me! Collective, where repairing and providing bicycles is a community project.

The collective is a volunteer-run bicycle recycling project that gives wheels to Greensboro residents.

The group solicits donations of bikes and tools, and gives repaired bikes away free of charge. The only requirement is that each recipient must help fix his or her bike before taking it home.

"If you want the bike, you've got to do the work," said Paul Figueroa, who fixed his bike with help from Bike Me! volunteers.

Sue Edelberg started the project with a friend about four years ago as a campus organization at UNCG. They modeled the project after Raleigh's 1304 Bikes.

The two founders graduated but the project stayed, jumping from campus to, most recently, a basement on Wilson Street.

On May 4, the shed doors opened in the current location behind Greensboro HIVE, a community center on Grove Street that houses various service groups. Volunteers, some of whom first received bikes and now come to help, work in the HIVE's parking lot from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays and some Wednesdays.

As gas prices hover around $4 per gallon, some locals welcome the donated bikes and repair help. Edelberg said the group has given away about 100 bikes this summer.

"Gas is not a pretty thing on the board anymore," said Lowell Clabaugh, a Bike Me! volunteer. By trade a mechanic, Clabaugh learned bike repair while volunteering at the collective. "This gets the community involved with one another," he said.

For those without his expertise or Edelberg's years of tinkering, Bike Me! - and its shed full of tools - is a great resource.

"I showed up two weeks ago, clueless," said Chad Camp, a UNCG grad who now works for Lutheran Family Services. Pointing to his bike, he added: "They're so much more complicated than you give them credit for."

Things are still disorganized at the collective. When it opened Sunday, about 20 people showed up. One volunteer mentioned starting a sign-in sheet to make things more orderly. But the idea was soon forgotten.

The Bike Me! volunteers hope to establish an Earn-a-Bike program that would require recipients to help at the HIVE in exchange for bikes. The better the bike's condition, the longer a recipient would volunteer.

But that idea hasn't taken off yet, mostly because volunteers have trouble locating people after they pick up their bikes.

On Sunday, Edelberg asked a recipient to help pump tires in exchange for his bike. A few minutes later, he'd ridden off.

But Edelberg said the collective - like the bikes - is a work in progress.

"I am still learning," she said. "Every time, I learn something new."

Contact Emily Stephenson at 373-7080 or emily.stephenson@news-record.com